


heart of steel starts to grow

by melimarron



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: El Had A Traumatic Childhood Okay, Eleven | Jane Hopper-centric, Not Beta Read
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-01
Updated: 2020-10-01
Packaged: 2021-03-08 04:28:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,069
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26759491
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/melimarron/pseuds/melimarron
Summary: Free•dom (noun): the power or right to act, speak, or think as one wants without hindrance or restraint. Something that Eleven never experienced before she escaped the lab.Eleven’s relationship with the concept of freedom, after twelve years in a lab.
Relationships: Eleven | Jane Hopper & Jim "Chief" Hopper, Eleven | Jane Hopper & Kali Prasad, Eleven | Jane Hopper & Maxine "Max" Mayfield, Eleven | Jane Hopper & Mike Wheeler, Eleven | Jane Hopper & The Party, Martin Brenner & Eleven | Jane Hopper
Kudos: 24





	heart of steel starts to grow

**Author's Note:**

> I don’t know if the fandom knows anything about El’s childhood, but I’ve decided that it was Sad. I mean, would you want your most promising experiment to know how to navigate the outside world? 
> 
> The title for this fic comes from The Script's "Superheroes".
> 
> Hope you enjoy!

The woods are terrifying. Eleven grew up only experiencing the outside world secondhand, through whispers from kind nurses and doctors when Papa wasn’t around. She grew up in sterile white halls, with electrodes attached to her skull. The woods are foregin and horrible and so, so unfamiliar it hurts.

It feels a little like freedom.

Then she gets hungry, and then Benny Hammond talks to her, and then the woman is there and Eleven has to get out leave run escape-

She runs back to the woods, the leaves and sticks and dirt prickling at feet that have only known the coolness of a hospital floor.

When it rains, she’s afraid for a heartbeat, until she remembers diagrams Papa had once shown her, explaining weather patterns, and all the times she’d seen the bad men walking in, complaining about their wet socks and coats. Knowing what rain is does not stop it from being uncomfortably cold and jarring and unfamiliar.

She wanders the woods for hours, hoping that she’s walking away from the lab. Each step is either bringing her further from or closer to her doom, and-

There are three boys ahead of her, arguing.

She thinks they’re arguing, anyway, about whether to go home or not. They’re the first people her own age Eleven has seen in a long time.

She doesn’t mean to startle them. She does anyway.

Their flashlights shine into her face, and Eleven can only breathe, blinded by the flashlights and the cold rain, the horrifying trees sweeping up into the sky around them.

* * *

One year later, she’s come to like the woods, sort of. They’ve come to mean safety. Eggos. Hopper. Then she finally comes to realize, after over three hundred days, that the woods are just another kind of hospital. They’re not as sterile and they’re not as painful, and Hopper is no scientist, but it doesn’t change the fact that they are confining her to one area.

That’s part of the reason she runs.

She’s exchanged one hospital (prison) for another. She’s exchanged one Papa (jailer) for another.

She knows, somewhere deep in her mind, that Hopper is not Papa and his home is not a hospital or a prison or anything like that. That doesn’t stop her from drawing comparisons, her mind insisting that Hopper is just like Papa, but that she knows better now. She will not accept being imprisoned again. She can’t.

So she runs.

She runs and she runs and she runs until she finds Kali. Kali, her sister, who spits and snarls and takes her pain and forces it into a weapon. Kali, whose powers allow her to fool everyone around her while she obliviously fools herself into the ultimate revenge story.

It takes El one day to figure out that Kali has escaped the white walls and careful surgery, but no matter how far or how fast Eight runs, her life still revolves around the lab, and it always will, and El’s left the lab behind her a long time ago. She’s not sure how long ago she left it, but she knows she did, and Kali still has a long way to go before she can stop being a scared little girl with a tattoo on her wrist and blood on her hands.

She still cries on the ride home. El might be physically closer to the lab and all the evils it has wrought, but on the inside, at least, she’s free, free, free, and she will be free forever.

* * *

“We make our own rules,” Max grins at her.

“That’s totally against the rules!” Mike says.

“I make my own rules,” El snaps, and it’s true, she hopes. She’s no Kali, a slave to her own fears even as she mocks others’, but she isn’t _Eleven_ , Papa’s good little experiment who had never so much as seen the sky before. She’s somewhere in-between.

She can make her own rules now, and maybe they’ll align with Hopper’s, like the stupid curfew rule, and maybe they won’t, like the even stupider three-inch rule.

She _can_ make her own rules. She _will_ make her own rules.

She hopes she can make good choices. She’s never really had a choice before.

* * *

She thinks that she might die inside the mall. A fitting end, sort of, for a girl who lived twelve years inside and only two outside. The only thing worse would be dying inside a hospital.

The hospital.

She’d been so jittery inside the hospital, waiting for Jonathan and Nancy to come back. Really, she’d been waiting for a doctor she recognized to pass and to call her Eleven and to drag her back into the hospital rooms to strap her on a gurney and shave her head and pick up right where they had left off.

She’s a little surprised she managed to stay so calm at the sight of all those white coats and unfriendly smiles.

But right now, Billy’s dying in front of her, and her ankle hurts so badly that she’s crying in pain, and her head is stuffed full with memories of laughing and living and breathing _outside_ , in a place where the ground is gritty and loose with sand and the ocean stretches on forever.

She’s never been to the beach before in real life. She wonders if she would like it, with no restrictions in sight.

* * *

Hopper is dead.

El can’t breathe.

Everything feels like it’s coming to a head. Billy’s grief for his mother is still overwhelming, and one look at Max only makes her remember Max’s own grief for Billy, and with Hopper’s death on top of all that-

El doesn’t remember much of what happened next.

* * *

Over the next three months, El comes to the realization that her powers are gone.

Over the next three months, El prepares to leave Hawkins.

Over the next three months, El dreams confused dreams about labs and Hopper and Demogorgons. She dismisses them. She can’t even understand the language the scientists are using with Hopper. It’s just a stupid dream.

As the Byers and El drive away from the town that had caused all of them so much pain, El looks back at the sky, and the clouds, and the horrible, stark lab.

 _I make my own rules,_ she thinks, and she wishes that she could go back in time to tell Hopper and Papa that she’s finally free.

**Author's Note:**

> What did you think?


End file.
